Our environment

Because of the nature of our business (financial services), we don’t create large environmental impacts through our own operations. For over ten years we have been actively working to minimise the impacts we do have.

Our stakeholders told us that, for our environmental impact, they expect us to:

lead by example

use our influence

support our people.

These insights formed the basis of our main environmental targets for the year 2020 (from 2013).

We have also added some newer, longer-term targets for the year 2025:

Reduce absolute Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 25%

Reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 25% per full-time employee

Maintain 30% reduction in paper use

Reduce waste by 25% and divert 99% from landfill.

All the above will be measured against our 2013 baseline.

Our operational impact

We focus on reducing our biggest green house gas (GHG) emitting activities first.This means reducing our energy use (53% of our emissions), emissions from business travel (44%) and our use of materials (paper 2% and <1% waste). These are also costs to our business at around £4 million, £10 million, (£600,000 and £150,000) a year respectively.

How we are doing in 2016

The table shows how we are performing against our 2013 baseline for our main sources of emissions.

Using our influence

We know our influence as an investor and buyer of services has far greater environmental implications than that of our operations alone. For example, we procure around 36,000 MWh of combined fuel for our own operations, but over 150,000 MWh of combined fuel is procured for our real estate investments.

Investments

Standard Life Investments integrate environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues throughout our investment process as we believe these issues are significant components of investment risk and can have a fundamental impact on the achievement of sustainable long term investment returns.

Alongside our regular company engagement we actively use our influence through voting at shareholder meetings of investee companies.

Real estate investments

With £22.2 billion in real estate assets under management, we have a responsibility to drive sustainability benefits for wider society. To achieve this, we have a robust set of procedures that embed continual improvement in the management of our assets. The diagram below shows the 2016 performance headlines for our real estate investments and more information is available in our annual sustainable real estate investment report.